Right on schedule, an alliance of NEPs (network equipment providers) formed last January has published its first Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) “profile.” The SCOPE Alliance profile shows what top NEPs care about most, the group says. SCOPE earlier this year published its first ATCA profile.

The SCOPE Alliance was founded this January by Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, and Siemens. It aims to create subsets of existing standards, such as CGL and ATCA, with the goal of promoting open platforms among service provider customers, it said at the time.

SCOPE says its initial CGL profile “describes a subset of the mandatory CGL 3.2 features and prioritizes the CGL 3.2 “roadmap” items that SCOPE deems necessary to support Carrier Grade Base Platforms (CGBP) for NEPs.” Going forward, SCOPE plans to analyze NEP requirements and extend its profile accordingly, it says.

Magnus Karlson, a member of the SCOPE Alliance's board of directors, stated, “A CGL distribution with this prioritized functionality and roadmap will lead to increased use by NEPs and ISVs. This will in turn result in accelerated feature availability, meaning it is more likely to be utilized by the world's leading NEPs when developing platforms for network elements.”

Karlson adds, “Publishing the profile as scheduled is further proof that the world's leading NEPs are serious about using the SCOPE architecture in their control-plane products.”